I don’t find myself listening to coke ravaged, long lost, classicist rock (70s variant) very often, Neil Young excepted and even him not that much any more, but sometimes a little bit of Dennis Wilson goes a long way.

And here’s the original. Everyone knows the story of Dennis Wilson- the only Beach Boy who could surf, good looking drummer, fell in with Charles Manson, lost much of the 70s to drink and drugs, made a great lost album, drowned. Carry Me Home, a lament for a dead soldier in Vietnam, was an out-take, never officially released. Dennis’ vocal is wracked with pain and sandblasted by coke and cigarettes. His great lost album Pacific Ocean Blue was re-released a while back and is well worth getting even though it can take a bit of getting into, but give me Dennis over re-recorded versions of Smile and Beach Boys copyist bands any day of the week.

Carry Me Home was the last track on side A of the Dixie-Narco e.p. released by Primal Scream in 1992, after the album Screamadelica the previous year. In one of those coincidences I notice that The Vinyl Villain has posted the entire e.p. today, but I’m going to plough on with this post regardless, as it was already part written. Written by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as an anti-Vietnam war song, Carry Me Home is a masterpiece, cited by producer Andrew Weatherall at one point as the best piece of work he’d done. The production and arrangement is stunning and it features one of Bobby Gillespie’s best vocals. If you get on over to The Vinyl Villain you can also get the song Screamadelica, an eleven minute acid house/rock/sample tour-de-force.